Rob Gallagher

'A horror story, the face is a horror story' - that, at least, was the attitude of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For Yuko Nasu the face belongs to a different genre, that of the detective story. As her show's title suggests, Nasu's paintings are about identification and retrieval. Each painting here represents a face, but these faces are often highly abstracted or blurred: facial features coalesce out of smutches, blots and sweeps of paint, but forever threaten to collapse back into anonymity and formlessness.

While some of the canvases are illustrational in their legibility and precision, others offer only the merest suggestion of recognisable humanity. Some resemble the reconstructed visages of accident victims or in utero foetuses - pinprick eyes, warped features, strings of teeth recessed into coral-red fields of scribbles. Although currently based in London, Nasu hails from Hiroshima, a fact which makes it even more tempting to read these faces as having been (de)formed by violence and mutation.

The grisliness  of these resonances is undercut, however, by how pretty and playful Nasu's work is. Though they retain a disquieting edge, ultimately these pieces are too tonally and texturally appealing to evoke disgust. Their subject matter, palette and technique occasionally call to mind Francis Bacon's portraits (which were, of course, both informed by images of diseases and wounds and much admired by Deleuze), but Nasu's touch is - literally and metaphorically - altogether lighter.

There's an appealing softness to many of the works here. Some of the heads look like they're made of heaped linguine or wool, while others are lyncanthropically furry. Patches of glaze and unbroken fields of tangy colour offer a contrast to the textural busyness of the dashes, speckles and whorls by way of which the faces themselves are constructed. The touchy-feeliness perhaps has something to do with how clearly the canvases record Nasu's own marks and gestures. The way she moves and re-moves paint is as important as the way in which she applies it, and the images bear witness to all manner of erasures, scrubbings and blurrings.

Babies, scientists now think, exit the womb 'hardwired' to detect faces. Two eye-like dots on a white circle is all it takes to trigger a response. Nasu's work manages to suggest both how amazing this ability is and how fun it is to exercise.? Detective runs from 19 November - 19 December 2009 at I-MYU projects at 23 Charlotte Road, London. The I-MYU website is here.